We’ve reported on all three of these upcoming ngmoco titles before, but last week, we actually had a chance to see them up at a producer-guided GDC demo. Impressions to follow!

Star Defense is ngmoco’s entry into the already-crowded tower defense genre, and it’s coming to us courtesy of Netherlands-based developer Rough Cookie. Mechanically, the game is pretty standard TD–you’re trying to protect interstellar ore depots from resource-hungry aliens, which adds up to placing towers to waste creeps. The turrets you have to work with aren’t really new either, from what we could see.

Here’s the twist (literally): the creeps come marching along the 3D surfaces of the game’s seven planets. Some are standard globes, but others come in more exotic configurations, like a hollow cube. Spinning the world around to get the full picture on your defenses is simple with multitouch. And the graphics are highly refined.

Star Defense has three difficulty levels, three upgrades per tower type, and ngmoco’s usual suite of achievements. It will be coming to the App Store “soon,” since it’s basically done, and is likely to cost somewhere in the $5-$7 range.

Touch Pets Dogs is still in an Alpha state, so we probably won’t see it in the App Store for another few months. It’s understandable, because this is a far more ambitious game than Star Defense.

As we’ve previously discussed, the digital pooches are under the sway of behavioral AI expert Andrew Stern, so they act and learn realistically. In order for your doggie to gain new skills, you have to train it by repeating tricks and activities. If you roll a ball around, the dog will chase after it; repeat, and he’ll eventually learn to balance on top of it.

This ties into the game’s mission structure, where your dog complete tasks to progress along one of five career tracks. For example, crime-fighting canines might be called to investigate vandalism at the pet store. This requires the dog to have built up its stats to a certain level, as well as special equipment like a flashlight. Completing missions unlocks access to new items and clothes, which feed right back into gameplay by unlocking new missions and boosting stats.

Finally, we learned a little more about Touch Pets Dogs multiplayer and social features. Friendly pooches are accessible via an in-game social network–complete with a Friends feed–that allows you to pluck a doggie off the Internet for an asynchronous play date, to satisfy your dog’s need for social time. In addition, certain career tracks like “superstar” or “politician” are heavily based on social missions, which are premised on relationships rather than stats.

Touch Pets Dogs features five breeds (Jack Russell Terriers, Westies, Labs, Dachshunds, and German Shepards), time of day awareness, support for multiple dogs, and over 100 in-game items. It’ll fall on the upper end of the price scale.

LiveFire is probably the game that everyone on this site wants to know the most about… but it’s also the least finished by far. It’s basically a tech demo at this stage, although the producer assured us that it would be out later this summer.

We weren’t able to go hands-on with LiveFire, but we did watch two players go head-to-head for a quick multiplayer matchup over WiFi; it appeared to work flawlessly. The game uses dual-stick controls like Dropship to move, strafe, and look; a quick jostle of the iPhone jumps, and double-tap fires.

The game’s frame rate was capped at 30 FPS for the purposes of the demo, but we were told that it can run much faster than that. We were also told that ngmoco’s run four-to-six player multiplayer matches over 3G with no issues.

By the time we finally got to sit down with him for a chat yesterday, ngmoco’s Neil Young was completely exhausted. Since his keynote address at GDC Mobile on Monday, he’d been giving one interview after another. As the public face of the hottest publisher on the hottest gaming platform on the planet, such is Young’s fate. But he’s not complaining, mind you. (more…)

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The fine folks at Milkbag games have released Sidewords. A fun little diversion of a word game that is the devil child of crosswords and scrabble. For each level in the game the grid must be completed to win the level — this means that each letter at the top and side must be used. And not just the top or side, but each word must be made up of letters from the top and side to create a grid. It’s a pain, but in the right kind of way. Even the simplest of the levels can be a head scratcher until you get used to the game. Well worth the $3 as a diversion while we wait for Milkbag to finally release Snow Siege.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math.

It’s not always easy to tear your kids away from their tablets and make them do something edifying. Thankfully, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math relieves you of this task by turning mathematics into a fun touchscreen video game. Win win!

Aimed at children 3-6 years old, the app makes math fun by ‘gamifying’ it, turning simple mathematics problems into little challenges so that your pre-schooler can learn and play at the same time.

There are more than two dozen mini-games, split across three categories: Numbers, Shapes and Measurements, and Add and Subtract. According to the developer the difficulty of these puzzles is adaptive too, so kids of any ability can be both encouraged and challenged.

Mini Dayz has launched and it’s a pixelated 2.5D open world that’s as brutal as the desktop version. In this game, the player is dumped on shore with nothing. They must scavenge around for food, water, and weapons while avoiding attack. It’s the kind of game where the goal is to stay alive as long as possible. But that will never be very long. It’s oddly free and seems to only have an ad on the main screen — for now.

Pewter Games has brought their charming point and click adventure The Little Acre to iOS. It’s an amazingly beautiful animated adventure set in a sort of hybrid magical / alien world. A great all ages adventure and very fun.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, The House of Da Vinci by Blue Brain Games. There’s a reason Leonardo Da Vinci is the only renaissance figure who routinely shows up in video games you know. With his remarkable inventiveness and genius for creative problem-solving, Da Vinci was a gamer through and through. He was just born 500 hundred years too soon. Thankfully, there are studios like Blue Brain Games to bring him to life in videogame form. The House of Da Vinci, which comes to us courtesy of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, is a puzzler that seeks to channel the artistry and innovation of its title character.

You play as one of Da Vinci’s more promising apprentices, and you have the challenging task of trying to work out where the hell he’s gone. Was he assassinated by the church? Who knows. Has he quietly gone into a retirement? Perhaps. Did he accidentally invent a shrink ray and shrink himself down to the size of an dustmite? Probably not. Da Vinci’s workshop looks beautiful, thanks to some impressive 3D graphics, and the in-game environment is crammed with all the elaborate machines and crazy inventions you’d expect to find in the workplace of a renaissance genius.(more…)

Poly Bridge is out now on iOS, and it’s good to have it! It’s a great game and many seem to agree that it’s the best bridge builder game available. But the iOS versions, so far, is missing the sandbox mode. I would hope that it’s coming soon in an update. If you are all interested in physics puzzlers, grab this one. (Note: the video is for the PC version, I have yet to see a trailer for the mobile version, the developer Dry Cactus isn’t that great at marketing…)

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